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Transparent text in your PowerPoint presentation lets objects in the background (for example, pictures, SmartArt etc) show through. You can make text have verying degrees of transparency, from completely solid, to 50% transparent (you can see the background but you can also see the shape of the text clearly), to completely transparent (you can’t see the text at all). But you’re not limited to 100%, 50% and 0 – you can have any percentage of transparency you want between 0 and 100.

To make your text transparent, first of all select it by clicking on the border of the text box it’s in, or by dragging your cursor over it. The advantage of dragging your cursor over the text is that you can select only a portion of the text – that is, precisely the text you want to make transparent – whereas clicking on the text box selects all the text inside. Use whichever method gives you what you want.

When your text is selected, you should see the Drawing Tools tab appear in the ribbon, with the Format tab within that. Go to the Format tab and click Text Fill in the WordArt Styles group. When the menu opens, click Gradient > More Gradients.

When the Format Text Effects window opens, make sure that Text Fill is selected on the left and select Solid Fill on the right. You should see a Transparency slider at the bottom of the window – drag that to the right to make your text more transparent and to the left to make it more solid.

Here is an example of some transparent text in a PowerPoint presentation:

In the example above, the text is clearly marked out by the border on it (use the Text Outline button to put a border on text). If you have this kind of a border on your text, you could actually make the Text Fill “No Fill” and you would still be able to read it. Using a semi-transparent colour for the text adds something extra, though.

The text formatting options in PowerPoint 2010 are very similar to those in other Office programs like Word. To format your text, first of all select it and then navigate to the Home tab > Font group. Here, you have all the standard formatting commands like bold, italic, underline, font size, font family, colour etc.

Applying the formatting is a simple case of clicking on the appropriate command button in this group. Let’s look at an example. On the following slide, we want to highlight the key words like subjects and times.

Click to enlarge

TIP: to select a whole word, double click on it. In the example above, we bolded the text, made it italic and underlined it. The formatting tools we need to accomplish this are all in the font group.

In fact, if you really want to speed up the process of applying these formatting effects, you can use the following shortcuts:

Bold – ctrl-b

Italic – ctrl-i

Underline – ctrl-u

In addition to the basic formatting you can apply using the Font group on the Home tab, you can also apply more advanced formatting using the Format tab within the Drawing Tools tab.

Let’s format the title slide. On the left hand side of the workspace in the Slides pane, click on the Title slide. This should be the very first slide in your presentation. Select the whole of the subtitle, as shown below:

TIP: a quick way to select a whole line of text is to tripleclick on one word in the sentence. We’re going to add a reflection to the subtitle, just because we can.

With the text selected, click on the Format tab within the Drawing Tools tab > WordArt Styles > Text Effects > Reflection, and select one of the options. We don’t want an exagerrated reflection, so let’s choose Tight Reflection, touching (the first option).